Miranda Lambert
Back to Main Page www.cmt.com biography Before becoming one of country music's most popular females, songwriter Miranda Lambert grew up in Lindale, TX, a small town 80 miles east of Dallas. The daughter of a country guitarist (Rick Lambert) and a detective agency owner, she was raised in a house dedicated to country music. Lambert began entering country talent contests when she was 16, including an appearance with the Johnny High Country Music Review in Arlington, TX. She learned to play guitar and began writing her own songs while continuing to enter various competitions, one of which earned her an appearance in a potato chip advertisement and the 2001 teen comedy Slap Her She's French. At 17 years old, she formed the Texas Pride Band and began gigging professionally, and later in 2001 -- with financial help from her father -- she showcased her songwriting skills by releasing an independent CD, Miranda Lambert. Two of the album's tracks, "Texas Pride" and "Somebody Else," even entered the Texas music charts. In 2003, Lambert successfully auditioned for Nashville Star, a reality TV series modeled after the American Idol format. She decamped to Nashville in order to appear on the show and eventually finished third in the competition, which led to a recording contract with Sony. Still only 21 years old, she released her first major-label single, "Me and Charlie Talking," in 2004, with the full-length Kerosene following in 2005. Lambert wrote or co-wrote ten of the album's 11 tracks, several of which became popular singles on country radio, and Kerosene eventually went platinum. Crazy Ex-Girlfriend experienced similar success upon its release in 2007; moreover, it established Lambert as one of country's newest "bad girls," a designation that nodded to the fiery temperament of her music. Lambert's songs spun tales of cheating boyfriends and domestic abuse, and they almost always ended with the singer extracting violent, spectacular revenge on her aggressors. For 2009's award-winning Revolution, however, she branched out into other subjects, drawing upon a happy (and highly publicized) relationship with fellow country star Blake Shelton while writing songs about love, regret, and childhood. Like the two albums before it, Revolution went platinum. In 2011, Miranda married Blake. She also released "Baggage Claim", the first single from her fourth album Four the Record, and collaborated with Ashley Monroe and Angaleena Pressley in the side project Pistol Annies. At the 2011 CMA Awards in November, Miranda won Female Vocalist of the Year for the second year in a row. Four the Record was released in November 2011, selling 133,233 copies in its first week. Miranda's second single from the album, "Over You", also proved successful. She picked up another ACM win for Female Vocalist of the Year in 2012. www.mirandalambert.com biography On the caution-vs.-candor scale, it's not hard to figure out where Miranda Lambert comes down. "I'm really not careful at all," she says. "I probably should be. I pretty much don't have anything to hide, though. I never hid anything growing up. My parents were PIs, so I really couldn't." She may have become a songbird instead of snooper, but in her own fashion, Lambert is following in the family business, as a private investigator of the heart -- a trade she recommences with relish in her third album, Revolution. The 25-year-old star's biggest hits have tended to be her boldest songs, so she's not about to put a lid on her plain-spokenness now. "I mean every word I say in every lyric of every song on this record, and every record I've ever done," she declares. "I would never take back one word or lyric or point I've ever made, because it's part of who I am. And there are plenty of artists who wouldn't do so much of that, if that's the kind of music you're into. But if you're into honesty, I have the records for you," she laughs. In her most successful single to date, "Gunpowder and Lead," Lambert declared that some little girls are made less of sugar and spice than more combustible substances. And the title track of her 2005 platinum debut, Kerosene, established her in the country music firmament as a figuratively and maybe even literally incendiary personality. But it may be no mistake that the new album's title, Revolution, could be taken as similarly aggressive or just a simple pledge of personal reinvention. "I'm a little more stable in my life, and not the crazy, wild-eyed kid that was writing 'Kerosene' at 18," she says. "I've been through a lot and grown up a lot on the road. And I've always kind of been a little older than my age anyway. I have the regular 25-year-old small town girl side to me that likes to make cupcakes and live on a farm, and then I have this rowdy, crazy, headbanging, rock-star-girl side that is my life on the road. I feel this record shows more a complete picture of who I am. On one end of the gamut lies the hard-rocking, vengeful "Sin for a Sin," cowritten by Lambert with Blake Shelton, in which it sounds like there might be the hint of a homicide. "Maybe, maybe not," she laughs, refusing to commit to an interpretation. "It's basically about cheating, love gone wrong, and the death of something, whether it's love or a person... That's trademark Miranda -- the song on my record that most sounds like me from 'Kerosene' or 'Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.' Nobody really gets to live out all their fantasies; I just get to sing mine in songs." At the other end of the Revolution-ary spectrum is the tender but still thoroughly realistic "Love Song," cowritten with Shelton and two members of Lady Antebellum. "A song called 'Love Song' I would never think would be on my record," she admits. "You know what I mean? Because I just don't sing songs like that. But this song is about real people in real love, not the fairy tale. And you know, I guess I've reached a point where, it's all right to maybe love somebody. Lambert is an artist of many complementary qualities that only appear on the surface to be contradictions. You can even see it in some of the magazine covers she's appeared on. She was recently the focus of her first cover story in Country Weekly, after previously fronting an issue of No Depression, a publication usually devoted only to non-mainstream, critically acclaimed, alt-country singer-songwriters. She's equally at home on the cover of First, a women's magazine ("Miranda's Bliss Tips!"), and Garden & Gun (which trumpeted her as "The New Loretta Lynn"). People named her one of 2009's "100 Most Beautiful People"... just a year after Esquire named her "Terrifying Woman of the Year." She may be comfortable embodying qualities at the far extremes of a particular divide, but don't call her a centrist. "I just think it's boring to be straight down the middle vanilla," Lambert says. "I have people that absolutely love me, and I'm sure I have people that absolutely hate everything that I ever stand for. But that's good. At least people are passionate about something, and talking about you either way. But just down-the-middle plain, that's never been my style, personally or professionally." That may have come as a surprise a few years ago to anyone who expected a certain acquiescence out of a former reality show contestant. Lambert came in third in the first season of Nashville Star, which certainly set up preconceptions about just what kind of artist she'd turn out to be. Yet, with years of playing Texas nightclubs under her belt even as a teenager, she faced down Nashville executives with the same steely determination with which she'd stared down rowdy bar crowds. And despite Music Row's rep for remaking impressionable artists in its own image, she says she's never faced resistance on her vision from anyone at Sony Nashville, on up to the label chairman. "Joe Galante is another person that absolutely let me be myself artistically. I don't know why, but I'm incredibly thankful for it, and I don't want to question it too much. I feel sorry for people that don't have that. But I think a lot of it people might bring it on themselves, because if you don't know who you are, then it's a lot easier to be swayed one direction or the other. And I came into this business it with such strong convictions. of: 'This is me. I can go back home to Texas and do what I do there playing in clubs, or I can try to become bigger. Anybody want to help me out here?' And it's worked thankfully." Her 2005 freshman effort, Kerosene, put her in an exclusive club, as one of only seven artists in the history of SoundScan to come out of the box at No. 1 on the country sales chart with a debut album. Critical support was immediately forthcoming: It was named one of the year's 10 best albums by the New York Times, Rolling Stone, and CMT.com, among many others. She picked up key nominations for the CMAs, Grammys, CMT Awards, and other honors, beating fellow newcomers Taylor Swift and Kellie Pickler to be named as the ACMs' top new female vocalist. In 2007, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend also debuted at No. 1 on the country chart. After a slew of top 20 singles, the sophomore album generated her first top 10 hit, "Gunpowder and Lead." It was named one of the top 10 albums of the year by Entertainment Weekly, Blender, and "dean of rock critics" Robert Christgau. In the Village Voice's annual all-genre poll of America's music critics, it placed No. 15, the highest showing ever by a country album amid the usually rock- and hip-hop-favoring survey. It fared even better -- No. 1, to be exact -- in the Nashville Scene's annual poll of national critics who specialize in country. "This year, our 96 voters handed Texas singer Miranda Lambert one of the most dominating victories in the poll's history," the Scene wrote in announcing the results. (The critics also named "Famous in a Small Town" the year's best single, as well as naming Lambert female vocalist of the year, songwriter of the year, and artist of the year.) It wasn't just journalists handing out the accolades, but the music industry, as Crazy Ex-Girlfriend won the coveted album of the year trophy at the 2008 Academy of Country Music Awards. What to do for a three-peat? To some degree, "we went with the school of 'If it ain't broke, don't fix it'," she says. "We worked with the same guys to do the record that did my last two -- same musicians, same producers." In the latter category are Frank Liddell and Mike Wrucke. "Frank is such a great song guy... And Wrucke's the total brain behind the way my records sound." But there are crucial differences, too. For one thing, Revolution includes 15 tracks instead of the Nashville-standard 10 or 11. "To me, if there's a story to tell in 15 songs, then people get 15 songs. I really wanted it to feel like a piece of art -- a real body of work, a musical journey if you will. And it is an album. The whole album is this huge circle with a picture of my face at the end. If you don't have the whole thing, then you don't have the complete picture. " To ensure the album had both cohesiveness and spontaneity, the vast majority of it was recorded in one whirlwind session in early 2009 (excepting two tracks that were laid down last November). "It was old school," says Lambert. "We went in and cut the whole project in a week. I didn't want to go record two songs one day and then two weeks later go record some more, and so on. We did it all as a single project, a vibe record. Usually the studio is really stressful, and this time it was just fun. It just felt like making music... not work." Stylistically, she says, "This record is country -- a lot more country than the other two. And I'm so glad about that. I didn't plan on writing more country songs or go into it with a style in mind, I just wrote what I felt and put it on the album." Of course, diehard traditionalists should be warned that, while she's capable of getting as pure honky-tonk as any young performer out there, Lambert is definitely a volume dealer. "My bass player brought up a good point: 'You write country songs and put a rock beat to 'em.' So 'Maintain the Pain' is definitely a country lyric, but it's got a classic rock sound to it." And mind-set? "I still hear the classic Miranda Lambert lyric and voice and attitude. But I definitely feel like this record's more well-rounded than the other two. I feel like it's a little more grown up." Not that she didn't always have a certain precocity. "My parents were private investigators, and I saw a lot and heard a lot growing up. As a family we went through financial hard ships while growing up, off and on we had to "grow" our own food. Going through all that really does stick with you, builds your character and lets you know who you are. Miranda has been through some changes in the last 2 years, like moving from Texas to Oklahoma, where she bought a farm a few miles away from her boyfriend Blake Shelton's. "It is like moving to another country, if you're from Texas!" she interrupts, laughing. "I have a little house on my parents' place that I've had for a long time. But I felt like I couldn't live 100 feet from my parents the rest of my life. So I bought a farm, and it's been the most amazing place. I feel like I gained some independence by buying some land and some animals and raising chickens. I really feel very grown-up now!" There is a measure of romantic contentedness in some of Revolution's songs, like the aforementioned "Love Song," or even the wryly mocking opening track, "Only Prettier." But if you're worried that Lambert might get a little too settled for her own musical good, don't. Was it hard to tap into tension when she was feeling that good about her personal life? "I found it amazingly easy," she counters. "Being happy and in love is the worst thing for your figure and your country music songwriting. But even though I'm happy and have a really great life right now, I found some angst." The maturity of ballads like "Virginia Bluebell" and "Love Song" doesn't preclude a fair share of new material in which Lambert definitely still acts her impetuous age. "I wrote from my perspective and where I am at 25 years old. It is who I am, and it's pretty honest." That bluntness extends to interviews. "I've always been open and really say my opinion. Not in a rude way; I don't ever want it to come across as cocky. I'm not cocky, I'm confident. I just think I have something to say. If people don't like it, then they don't like it. You can agree to disagree." You may get an even greater sense of Lambert's firebrand side from "Heart Like Mine," in which the singer writes about her expectations of the hereafter... which involves Jesus greeting her with a couple of wine glasses. "I grew up in church, and I've been a Christian my whole life. My mom always says I cut my teeth on a church pew. It could be autobiographical in a way, because I've definitely had my share of being judged but I'm playing a character a little bit in every song, too." Lambert is a character, in a lot of people's minds -- and while she doesn't actively try to go against the Music Row grain, she doesn't mind if she's perceived that way. "I hope I've been able to break open some doors for more open-mindedness in country. People have told me I have. But it's been a lot of work, and it's been a lot of putting my feet in the dirt and saying, here's the line I won't cross. I may have lost a lot of things for it or I may have gained a lot of things. But I know that I sleep great at night. I hope to do this forever, whether it will be performing for 10,000 fans or singing in some bar, 20 years from now. Fortunately for country fans, we're still at the relative beginning of Lambert's career, able to relish a performer who only seems to be as seasoned as someone in her 40s while really having decades ahead of her. May she continue maturing in all the right ways -- and failing to lose her youthful feistiness in all the right ones, too. As they say: Viva la Revolution. 2011 - Four the Record biography In her hit single “Baggage Claim,” Miranda Lambert sings about the kind of luggage you wish would get lost. “I have been dragging around your sensitive ego,” she tells an ex-friend or lover -- soon concluding, with characteristic swagger, that she’ll “drop your troubles off at the conveyor belt/I hand you a ticket to go get it yourself.” Mr. Needy is left doing loops on the suitcase carousel while Lambert’s rocking out in the unloading zone. With the release of Four the Record, Miranda comes bearing some baggage of her own – the precious kind, well-earned over the course of three highly loved (and unanimously platinum) prior albums. Her accolades could fill a whole set of trunks. To point out just one carry-on case’s worth of kudos: She is country’s reigning female vocalist of the year, as bestowed by both the Country Music Association and the Academy of Country Music. She’s won the prized album of the year trophy from both organizations, as well – from the ACMs for her second record, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, and from the CMAs and ACMs for her third, Revolution. She received the top country female vocal performance honor at the most recent Grammy Awards for “The House That Built Me.” And, lest all her honorifics be so high-minded, she’s been named one of People magazine’s Most Beautiful People and one of Maxim’s Hottest Women of Country. Frequent flyers can hardly rack up more awards points than that. So when “Baggage Claim” was released to country radio stations in August, Lambert realized she was something she’d never expected to become: an automatic add. She’s thrilled with her own radio success because, prior to Revolution, she’d never even had a top 5 single. Two years ago, as that make-or-break effort was prepared for takeoff, you didn’t have to listen far to hear whispers that maybe those same cutting-edge qualities that made her an award-show queen and press darling would be the kiss of death when the commercial rubber hit the road. But in 2010, she finally earned the triple crown – love from industry orgs, critics, and radio – when she bagged her first three No. 1 singles with “White Liar”, “The House That Built Me” and “Heart Like Mine.” Naturally, with “Baggage Claim” burning a kerosene-fueled trail up the chart in advance of Four the Record, she approached the impending release of this album with a good deal more certainty. Not that anyone would have called her unconfident before now, mind you. But… “I’ve never had an album release coincide with a hit, ever,” she points out, in the midst of her enthusiasm about the success of “Baggage Claim” as a teaser for the new album. “Revolution came out on a single that died in the 30s.” (For the record, that would be “Dead Flowers,” which marked the very last time that programmers were unsure whether to take a chance on Lambert.) “So I’m excited and so thankful. Because I don’t blame the program directors and DJs who used to have to put my songs on and have the listeners go, ‘What the hell is this?’ I am different, and I am a little edgy. But I’ve played so many tours and been on the road so much, I feel like people get me now. Or else they think, ‘She’s not going away, so we might as well just start liking it’,” she laughs. Of course, merely being worn down has nothing to do with what made America fall in love with ‘Ran, as she’s known to her fans. The fascination began in earnest when she was a humble yet feisty runner-up on Nashville Star in 2003, standing out as the most independent and least likely of all reality-show contestants. Sony Nashville quickly signed her with the understanding that, even though she was still a teen, she had the moxie and know-how to write many of her own songs and pick her own team, like co-producer and fellow Texan Frank Liddell. Reflective singles like “Famous in a Small Town” proved her wise beyond her tender years, and rowdy ones like “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” proved her bold beyond all expectations of just how fresh a country freshman should be. Her recent nuptials to fellow country star Blake Shelton only heightened fans’ natural curiosity: Is she really a raging, red-hot rock & roll mama or blushing country bride? The answer, of course, as heard in Four the Record, is all of the above and then some. The new 14-song set is epic in its range of musical styles and even the varied expressiveness in Lambert’s unmistakable voice. She’s clearly in a class with the slim handful of superstar “album artists” whose every full-length release is anxiously anticipated as an event that’s much more than just the sum of its singles. “My sole mission with the Revolution album was to go ‘Hey, get me out of this corner you’re pushing me in. I’m not just ‘Kerosene’ and ‘Gunpowder and Lead’ and all that.’ I mean, that’s part of me, but I have so much more to say, and I definitely think I’ve been able to do that.” The sense of “mission accomplished” was cemented when, against all odds, it was two of the last album’s most subdued and sensitive songs, “The House That Built Me” and “Heart Like Mine,” that were the ones to take her to the top of the country chart (for four solid weeks, in the case of “House”). When it came time to record Four the Record, the methodology wasn’t much different. As before, Lambert did a lot of the writing herself or in tandem with friends, while also picking selections from Music Row’s favorite tunesmiths (including Chris Stapleton and Lady Antebellum’s Charles Kelley) and the leading lights of alt-country (this time, Gillian Welch and Allison Moorer). But while Revolution was recorded in two sessions of a week or less, the recording of Four the Record was even more compact, taking a mere five days from start to finish. Needless to say, getting things done in such a hurry represents an artistic choice, not an economic one. “If everybody can get in one vibe and stay there the whole week, it makes it sound like an album, instead of chopped up,” Lambert maintains. “I’m a creature of habit, so I feel that, if this is working, let’s do it the same way. We started at 10 a.m. and went to midnight every night, and after the first night, everybody got so comfortable.” It didn’t hurt that the vast majority of musicians had worked on her previous three albums, too, as had trusted co-producer Liddell. Even after recording Four the Record all day Monday through Friday, most of the same team reconvened on Saturday to record the four songs that were needed to wrap up the Pistol Annies’ previously-in-progress album. As most country fans know by now, the Annies are the all-gal trio that Lambert formed with friends Ashley Monroe and Angaleena Presley, and their frisky debut came out in August…released by Sony as a digital-only album. Expectations were modest. So when Hell On Heels debuted at No.1 on the country sales chart and in the pop top 10, the pressing plants got to work trying to meet the demand from retail stores who wanted to carry the disc, too. What’s nearly comical is how the recording of Four the Record, not to mention the Annies’ Hell on Heels, came right on the heels of Lambert’s short honeymoon. She went into the studio just a week after her wedding. For most mortals, recording a solo album or finishing up a group album or exchanging vows with the love of your life would be pressure enough, without combining those three things into a potentially lethal cocktail. But, as most of the watching world has figured out by now, Lambert is not the type to easily buckle just because she’s squeezed three major life events into the middle of her tour schedule. “My goal was to have everything lined up and have the songs picked out before the wedding,” she says. (It came down to the wire: At her rehearsal dinner, Miranda was still doing some business, as she took songwriter/friend Kasey Musgraves outside to beg for permission to cut “Mama’s Broken Heart,” a song without which she felt she couldn’t make the album.) Remarkably, anyway, everything went according to plan, and Lambert wasn’t putting pen to paper or dialing up publishers during her newlywed week off. “It was great, because I got to clear my head a little bit before going in,” she says. So if you hear some tranquility in the album—from, you know, a woman whose popular image hasn’t always shouted softness—that’s not an illusion. You might sense that peace most in the closing “Oklahoma Sky,” which Allison Moorer wrote specifically for Lambert. There are other guests on Four the Record that meant a lot to Miranda, including guest vocalists from Patty Loveless to the women of Little Big Town. But Moorer’s “Oklahoma Sky” was the ultimate wedding present: a country benediction for the bride’s new beginning. “I’m from Texas,” Lambert says—perhaps you’ve heard?—“and we’re Texas-proud and annoying and all that. I will always be from Texas. But now with this new life, I’ve moved away from my family and started my own and married an Okie. I feel like it’s my ode to my beautiful new home state. Just as much as I love Texas, I now love Oklahoma, and it’s my song for my life there now.” Whatever sky she’s under, fans in all 50 states (and beyond) will want to share the vista with her. And they’ll surely let Lambert bring all the bags. Category:Artists